People's experience and facts of changing climate: impacts and responses

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the local knowledge on climate change, its impacts and the responses they are making at the household or community level to deal with the changes on the basis of their experiences and perceptions. Design/methodology/approach – The study was based on household survey conducted with one male and one female respondent in 202 households. Alongside, series of focused group discussions were conducted with local people to capture the perception on about climate change, its impacts and adaptation strategies applied to enhance their resilience capacity to changing climate. Rainfall and temperature data were collected from Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) for seven and four different stations, respectively, within Kathmandu Valley and analyzed to understand the climatic trend. Findings – The perception of most of the local people on changes in temperature was almost in line with the recorded long-term climatic trend both showing an increasing trend, whereas the perception of decreasing both monsoon and non-monsoon rainfall did not match with the recorded data as the rainfall data analysis did not reflect any clear long-term pattern. People have been facing several impacts such as decrease in water sources, decrease in agricultural crop production, increase in new crop pest and weeds in agricultural crops. Local people are responding to these impacts as per their own skills and traditional knowledge. Originality/value – This is totally original research article and the impacts and adaptations measures documented in this article may represent the case of peri-urban areas of least developed countries like Nepal.

Farmers' Perceptions of and Adaptations to Changing Climate in the Melamchi Valley of Nepal

“…As a response to drought, midhills farmers started planting Ghaiya and Khumal-4 rice (which is drought resistant and matures in 141 days), whereas lowland farmers adopted Makwanpur-1 and Malika rice (which requires less fertilizer and is flood-resistant). Such practices were also reported by Manandhar et al (2011) and Sada et al (2013).…”

Effectiveness of the Local Adaptation Plan of Action to support climate change adaptation in Nepal

“…People's experiences and perspectives is important in pursuing adequate responses (Sada, Shrestha, Shukla, Melsen, 2014). The third lesson is that due to the cross-cutting nature of climate change adaptation, a silo, short-term project approach led by a single agency is likely to fail.…”

Representations of Colombian Andean farmers on climate change and mitigation and adaptation strategies

“…& Broome) due to new humidity and temperature conditions that favor their reproduction and virulence. In fruit and vegetable crops, farmers reported attacks of pests and diseases that decrease yields and crop quality, attributed to the effects of climate change (Sada et al, 2014).…”

“…Likewise, adaptation and mitigation practices have been implemented to guarantee the sustainability of the agricultural sector, among which are: conservation agriculture (Steward et al, 2018), climate-smart agriculture (Engel & Muller, 2016;Saj et al, 2017;Confalone et al, 2016;Andrade et al, 2014), the 4% 0 soil carbon sequestration initiative (Chabbi et al, 2017) and local responses to climate change (Sada et al, 2014).…”